I had grown up as a feature writer, and basically my career had been in The National Lampoon and as a magazine editor, and I'd never been a reporter.

It takes a lot of weapons to do good works (as Richard the Lionhearted could have told us). And this is not just a Somali problem. We have poverty and deprivation in our own country. Try standing unarmed on a street corner in Compton handing out twenty-dollar bills and see how long you last.

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty - their power and privilege - to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians.

Writing this book required an enormous amount of help from friends. To them goes the credit. I'll take the money.

Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.

We're gonna be in a world of hurt if we don't get it fixed, because there's going to be billions of people out there - they're hungry, they're mad. One thing that they can get their hands on is guns.

The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know.